Film: La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
Director: Carl Theodore Dreyer
Country: France / Denmark
Released: April 1928
Runtime: 148 minutes
Genre: Historical Drama
Studio: Société Générale des Films
Influenced: Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Henri-Georges Clouzot
Carl Theodor Dreyer was the great cinematic explorer of the landscape of the human face. He pioneered the close-up and flashbacks and, in filming The Passion of Joan of Arc, he insisted on no make-up for the actors to give a greater sense of naturalism. As well as the script, which Dreyer painstakingly based on actual records of Joan of Arc's trial for heresy in 1431, what's also remarkable about the film is the performance of Falconetti as Joan. Poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau captured the film's charm perfectly when he said it "seems like an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn't exist".
Like many great silent films, the original version was thought lost, but then in the 1980s Dreyer's original edit (before its censorship by the Catholic Church for showing Joan's stigmata) turned up in a psychiatric hospital in Norway, whose director was friends with Dreyer at the time the film was made. Dreyer was furious at the film's censorship so it was a clever move on his part to send out copies of the original edit in secret. While The Passion of Joan of Arc achieved critical success upon its release, it flopped financially and this – along with the controversy over the film – put Dreyer's career on hold for several years.
The movie is comprised of five gruelling cross-examinations that Joan must face at the hands of the various judges, and at each stage Dreyer uses his camera to perform giant close-ups of the protagonists so that we can discern their emotions. So close is the camera that a knowledge of French allows you to almost lip read the words as they come out. We get to see the drama played out warts, tears & all and there's something almost weirdly erotic about the intimacy of the film's shot.
Dreyer has said that the Passion of Joan of Arc doesn’t have the same balance of his later films because he was less mature at the time – with Ordet cited by him as his most harmonious movie – but its influence is huge and the performance of Falconetti is one of the finest you'll ever see on film.
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